Guy Fawkes Biography

Guy Fawkes (1570–1606), a devout and militant Catholic in an
age when the Protestant Church of England had solidified its hold on
British religious life, is remembered as the individual who tried to
perpetrate what is thought to have been one of history's most
notorious terrorist acts. The Gunpowder Plot, also known as the Powder
Treason, was a failed conspiracy to blow up Britain's Houses of
Parliament on November 5, 1605. Fawkes, lurking in a cellar below the
Parliament buildings, was arrested as he prepared to ignite the
explosion.

Fawkes was not the originator of the Gunpowder Plot. He was a traveling
soldier—mercenary would be the wrong word, for his motivations were
primarily religious, not monetary—brought in on the plan because of
his munitions experience. Ever since the plot's discovery, however,
he has been the figure most associated with it in the public mind. His
perceived primacy has been due to a confluence of several factors, first
and foremost being that it was he who actually tried to execute the plan,
and was tortured afterwards to make him give up the names of his
coconspirators. Fawkes was also a charismatic figure who has seized the
imaginations of makers of popular culture, all the way up to the hit film
V for Vendetta
(2006).

Had Mixed Religious Background

The Gunpowder Plot was a chapter in the long history of conflict between
Britain's Protestants and Catholics, and the religious dichotomy
was present in Guy Fawkes's own family background. Fawkes was born
on April 13, 1570, in the town of Stonegate in England's Yorkshire
region. He had two sisters, Anne and Elizabeth. His father, Edward Fawkes
(sometimes spelled Faux), was a judicial court official. As such, he was
required, under the state Church of England religion (now known as
Anglicanism, with the Episcopal Church as its American branch), to swear
an oath pledging that he was a Protestant, and there was nothing in his
own family background to suggest that he was anything else.
Fawkes's mother, Edith, was another story. She, like many other
Catholics, put up a Protestant facade, but her nephew became a Jesuit
priest and some of her relatives were recusants—English Catholics
who refused to attend Protestant church services.

Edward Fawkes died when Guy was eight, and his mother showed her true
sympathies by marrying another recusant, Denis (or Dionysus) Bainbridge,
described by an acquaintance (according to the Gunpowder Plot Society) as
"more ornamental than useful." The family moved to a home
near the village of Scotton in North Yorkshire. From that point on, Fawkes
likely began to come in contact with devout Catholics who were working
through official channels and also by underground means to safeguard and
advance the rights of Catholics under the country's increasingly
entrenched Anglican regime.

He likely received another dose of this underground Catholicism when he
attended St. Peter's School in the city of York (which still
exists, and notes Fawkes as an alumnus if not as a role model). The
school's headmaster, John Pulleine (or Pulleyn), was nominally
Protestant, but St. Peter's was likely a hotbed of Catholic
resistance; its former headmaster had been imprisoned for 20 years as a
convicted recusant, and Pulleine's entire family was sympathetic to
the Catholic cause. One local noblewoman, according to Gunpowder Plot
historian Antonia Fraser, called the school "Little Rome."
Fawkes, according to one source, married Pulleine's daughter Maria
and had a son, named Thomas, in 1591. Other early accounts of
Fawkes's life make no mention of the marriage, which could suggest
that it was very short (perhaps with mother and child dying in childbirth)
or that it did not occur at all.

Several contemporary accounts agree, in any event, that Fawkes as a young
man had become serious about Catholicism. When he reached adulthood, he
took steps to raise cash for an extended period of military service
abroad, renting out his family's land near York to one Christopher
Lomley under a 21-year lease. For a year or two he worked as a footman to
the Catholic nobleman Lord Montague, and he may have met Robert Catesby,
the originator of the Gunpowder Plot, through family connections during
this period. Around 1593, he left England for Flanders (a Dutch-speaking
region now divided among northern Belgium, France, and the Netherlands),
which was then under the control of Spain, Western Europe's great
Catholic power, and he enlisted in the Spanish army. A military associate
(quoted by David Herber) described Fawkes as "a man of great piety,
of exemplary temperance, of mild and cheerful demeanor, an enemy of broils
and disputes, a faithful friend, and remarkable for his punctual
attendance upon religious observance."

Recognized by Superiors

Spain, whose feared Armada had tried unsuccessfully to launch an invasion
of England in 1588, had expansionist ambitions, and was also facing
resistance to the north from Dutch Protestants. Fawkes saw plenty of
military action, serving under the command of the Archduke Albert of
Austria, Spain's ally. He fought for the Spaniards in a battle at
Calais, in western France, in 1595, and he may have been wounded at the
Battle of Nieuport in Flanders in 1600. Among his assignments was one in
which he learned to blow up a procession of military wagons. In both these
campaigns he came to the attention not only of his Spanish and Austrian
commanders but also of a group of English Catholic nobles sympathetic to
the Catholic side. He was recognized not only for military valor but also
for his virtue and general intelligence.

By 1603 Fawkes was serving in a regiment commanded by one of these English
nobles, Sir William Stanley. Styling himself Guido Fawkes, he was an
ensign, on his way to the rank of captain. But Stanley and his associates
decided that Fawkes's skills might better be put to use in the
diplomatic arena. That year he was sent to Spain on a mission to convince
the Spanish monarchy that the time was ripe for another invasion of
England on behalf of its beleaguered Catholics. At the time, King James I
had just acceded to the throne after the death of the childless Queen
Elizabeth I. Fawkes, whom Fraser (drawing on contemporary artworks)
described as "a tall, powerfully built man, with thick,
reddish-brown hair, a flowing moustache in the tradition of the time, and
a bushy, reddish-brown beard," presented a powerful case. English
citizens, he claimed, were ready to throw off the rule of James, a Scot
enmeshed in a variety of political intrigues.

The move, however, had more than a hint of desperation. After the
establishment of the Church of England under King Henry VIII and a
temporary and gruesome return to Catholicism under Queen Mary
("Bloody Mary"), Protestantism had become well entrenched
under Elizabeth, as even the Spaniards recognized. They gave Fawkes a
polite reception, but they were moving in the direction of a permanent
peace with England, and Fawkes's mission went nowhere. Meanwhile
King James, suspicious of the intentions of English Catholics, sharpened
his anti-Papist invective and imposed new fines on recusants.

In Brussels after his Spanish mission, Fawkes was introduced by Stanley to
Tom Wintour, a Catholic soldier. Wintour or Stanley informed Fawkes of a
plot under consideration by English nobleman Robert (or Robin) Catesby,
whose father had undergone long imprisonment for his Catholic affiliation,
and whose own militancy had deepened as he fell on hard times. Fawkes
seemed the perfect foot soldier for the plan's execution. He knew
guns and explosives well, and since he had been away from England for many
years, his name and face were unknown to Sir Robert Cecil, Earl of
Salisbury and the head of the English monarchy's secret police.

Hatched Plot in Pub

In May of 1604, Fawkes, Catesby, Wintour, and two other conspirators met
at an inn in London's upscale Strand district and swore an oath to
carry out Catesby's plan: to throw England into chaos by killing
its king and lawmakers in a massive explosion, to install King
James's young daughter, Elizabeth, as Queen and arrange her
marriage to a Catholic monarch from elsewhere in Europe, thus restoring a
Catholic monarchy. As time passed, other Catholic activists were let in on
the plan, which may have contributed to its ultimate undoing. Fawkes
assumed the identity of John Johnson, a servant to one of the other
plotters, Thomas Percy.

At first the plan was to tunnel under the Parliament buildings, but the
plotters benefited from a stroke of good fortune: the empty cellar of an
adjoining building extended underneath their target, and they succeeded in
renting it. The Westminster district in London's West End was a
crowded warren of streets and businesses at the time, and Fawkes/Johnson
attracted little notice as he was installed as caretaker. By early 1605
the plotters had begun to fill the cellar with barrels of gunpowder. To
disguise it they covered it with iron bars and bundles of kindling, known
in British English as faggots. They had to replace the powder as it
"decayed" or went stale.

Finally a date for the explosion was set: November 5, 1605, when King
James, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons would all be in
attendance in the same chamber. The Powder Treason began to unravel on the
night of October 26, with the delivery of an anonymous letter to a
Catholic nobleman, Lord Monteagle, advising him to concoct an excuse to
avoid the opening of the Parliament session on November 5. Monteagle
informed Sir Robert Cecil of the letter's contents, and Cecil
informed the King. Continuing uncertainty over who wrote the letter,
together with signs that pointed to its being a forgery, have given rise
over the centuries to theories that the Gunpowder Plot was devised not by
Catholic militants but by Cecil himself, with the intention of permanently
crippling Britain's Catholics in the ensuing uproar. In this
version of events (promoted in recent times by Francis Edwards), Fawkes
and Catesby were double agents. The preponderance of historical opinion
holds that the Treason was a genuine terrorist plot, but the debate
continues.

Whatever the case, the cellars beneath the Parliament buildings were
searched on the night of November 4, and Fawkes was discovered, along with
the gunpowder. Described as a very tall and desperate fellow, he gave his
name as John Johnson. King James, according to Fraser, ordered that
"the gentler Tortures are to be first used unto him
et sic per gradus ad ima tenditur
[and so by degrees proceeding to the worst]," although torture was
illegal in England at the time, and had been since the signing of the
Magna Carta, the 1215 document that restricted the power of the English
kings. Fawkes was hung from a wall in manacles and proba-
bly placed on the rack, a notorious device that slowly stretched a
prisoner's body until he lost the use of his limbs. After two days,
Fawkes gave up the names of his coconspirators, all but one of whom were
tracked down and executed or killed. Prior to his execution by hanging in
Westminster's Old Palace Yard on January 31, 1606, Fawkes was
barely able to sign his own name on a confession. After dying on the
scaffold, he was drawn and quartered.

Restrictions harsher than any they had yet experienced were placed on
English Catholics by King James, and November 5 became a national holiday
in England, known as Firework Night, Bonfire Night, or Guy Fawkes Day. In
the colonial United States it was celebrated as Pope Day, featuring a
ceremony in which the Pope was burned in effigy, but the holiday was
gradually absorbed into the Halloween festivities that occurred a few days
earlier. Guy Fawkes Day evolved away from its roots in Britain, where the
targets of the fire might include contemporary figures despised by the
public. As part of a group of anti-terrorist measures, the cellars of the
Houses of Parliament are still searched by guards each year before the
legislature opens in November.